Ex-Twitter Employees should build a new Twitter | Hacker News Reader

Ex-Twitter Employees should build a new Twitter

17 pointsethanjinsen19 comments

Seems like this mass Exodus of talent from Twitter is a good opportunity for the former employees to get together and build a different Twitter. I bet a bunch of people would be willing to move.

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I'm not sure that anyone could create another Twitter.

Not from a technical standpoint, but from building a userbase.

The X-factor for Twitter, from my observations, was that they used established media as their biggest advert or ambassadors. This was kind-of organic, though making tweets easy to embed was surely one of the biggest part of it. The value of the free advertising Twitter has received from publicity in media is probably in the hundreds of billions. That's all from making it easy to embed tweets in articles, providing APIs and branding guidance for on-air graphics and so on. They quickly got journalists and news producers as users. The snake eats it tail and as soon as politicians noticed that a tweet could be on all the news outlets within the hour they focused more and more of their messaging to be through Twitter. That's really hard to build up again.

And on that same note the media can kill Twitter in a few weeks, stop saying X said Y on Twitter and just say 'on social media'. Stop embedding tweets or using screenshots/branded graphics from Twitter - or just stop reporting what someone has posted on Twitter.

Normally yes building the userbase is the hardest part but I believe this is a "fork" in the road where a massive ideological difference exist between 2 camps such that you could convince a huge portion of users to migrate. An crypto example would be Ethereum and Ethereum classic.

- said everyone ever

They can make 100 copies if they want

Twitter's value is not the platform, its the userbase.

Everyone here should already know that

That's funny! So they can lose another 5 billion and do as little real work as possible, like at the old twitter?

What to call it, though?

Frapr.. Bittr.. Buta.. But.tr.. Flutr.. Nutr.. NuBrd.. Zingr.. Dumpz.. Mnga.. Bodcastrr.. Rumpadumppump.. Frolyc.. Ho.nk.. Hor.net.. IcqToo.. VelociRaptr.. Flacc.id.. Boracle.. Gogglez.. Goorikle.. SmetaFace.. Blu.rp.. WebVan.. Tweebo.. Twerpr.. Zittr.. Laamaar.. Sc.abz.. Hunna.z.. Bu.nz.. Plog.gg.. Gro.pr.. Sa.cc.. Sak.cr.. Slac.kr.. Shak.me.. Shre.kr.. HipT.at.. Bwigl.. Jiglr.. Binjr.. WebVan.. WebVan.. WebVan..

Nope, all trash. Naming things well is hard.

- Thoughts (maybe too on the nose) - Blurb (from the word) - Pings (i.e. like checking in, seeing what's up)

You are making fun of the generic names for tech companies but as you said (probably sarcastically) naming is hard. Imagine you have an idea for an amazing product but can't come up with a good name, should you drop your idea and give up or just copy the style of names everyone else is doing?

Tho.ts would be hilarious and awesome, but not PC.

Pin.gz / pin.gs seems good and accurate.

But I think abstract is better, e.g. pon.ys or poni.es, shotz

I also like blu.rp but it's admittedly gross sounding, can you imagine the media quoting this? "Shakira sent this blurp:" Me neither. Almost as bad and gassy sounding as the masta "toot" thing.

If you think about it out of context (forget for a second that it exists), twitter is a pretty stupid sounding name.

"poni.se" sounds like "Ponzi Scam"

I do like your recommendation of "shotz" like "Let me take a shot at this by offering a comment on the situation"

Twitter comes from “a short burst of inconsequential information, and chirps from birds

was thinking qwitter could be appropriate

Kroud

I guess we're about to find out if it really was all necessary talent that left. If Twitter usage continues to increase, even with some crashes, that will probably indicate that many former employees were not actually performing useful work, and so would be unlikely to "build a new Twitter."

1. Is twitter usage increasing in the way that would be best for the business?

- Advertising revenue is down per Elon Musk

- Internal research reported by Reuters says that twitter is losing its most active users. From the article "These "heavy tweeters" account for less than 10% of monthly overall users but generate 90% of all tweets and half of global revenue." [1]

2. You claim if that usage continue to increase that means the former employees weren't performing useful work. There could be other reasons business improves besides the amount of work employees perform.

- More right-wing people join Twitter because Elon Musk took over and they want to show support

- Twitter increases its advertising and that leads to more traffic

- More websites link to Tweets which drives traffic

- Another Covid lockdown occurs causing more people to go to Twitter

- China officially unblocks Twitter

Correlation does not imply causation

[1] https://www.reuters.com/technology/exclusive-where-did-tweet...

I have even idea to make it ad free.

1) it will have plans free, newbie, pro 2) free plan gets 10 tweets/month 3) newbie (1$/month) - 100 tweets/month 4) pro 5$/month - 1000 tweets/ month

If this really does tank, what is the likelihood/options for the Twitter assets to be bought by someone?

Meh. Why not take all the learnings from failure and create something better, that doesn't fail so hard at things we take for granted in the West?

They could just spin up a mastodon instance. But as others have stated, the user base is the important part.

Mastodon doesn’t scale.

No. There’s no point when Mastodon exists. And Twitter has massively improved just in the last few weeks.

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